Part 11

As he turned slowly, she greeted him with a smile of welcome and nodded towards her sister's portrait. "She wouldn't have cried, you know."

"Wouldn't she?"

He had to say something; that seemed as good as anything. He made no attempt to approach her, but stood at bay against the window just where he had turned. He had arrived at one fixed determination; whatever happened, he would not again be entrapped into sharing the couch with her.

In answer to his unenthusiastic enquiry, Maisie shook her head vigorously like a little girl. "No, Di wouldn't. She never cries. Even when we were children we couldn't make her."

It flashed on Tabs that this conversation about the unknown woman was intended as a kind of peace-offering. Not to be ungracious, he roused himself to a show of interest. "Couldn't make her! Surely you weren't so cruel as to try?"

"Here's your hanky," she said, tossing the moist, scrunched ball across to him. "Cruel! We didn't mean to be cruel. I suppose we were. She used to ask us to try. There was a game we played; we called it Christian Martyrs. She was always the martyr; she liked it. All she ever did when we hurt her was to say, 'Do it harder; I can bear more than that.' She was as proud then as she is to-day of all that she could bear. I think that's what made her husband furious. She seemed always to be saying to him, 'Do it harder,' and he certainly did. But neither he nor any one else has ever succeeded in making her cry."

Tabs glanced at the aloof beauty of the painted face--it was like the face of a Roman Empress, so proudly secure in its serenity. "Make her cry! Why should any one want to make her cry? To do that would be a kind of blasphemy."

"That's why," Maisie clasped her hands eagerly. "You've said it for me exactly. I've never known how to put it. It's the holiness of God that tempts men to revile Him. He evades them, outlasts them and yet compels their affection. They have no power over Him and can't destroy Him, though they can destroy everything else in the world. What a man loves and has no power over, he longs to destroy; either that, or to drag it down to his own level, so that he can get his arms round it and comfort its weakness and hug it to his breast. It was that way with Di and her husband. He couldn't drag her down. He couldn't find her weakness. She was always up there. So he reviled her."

A silence fell between them. They stared at each other across the room's breadth, finding each in the other something at the same time intimate and incomprehensible; each feeling that they stood on the verge of a discovery. It was Tabs who spoke.

"_Was!_ Then he's dead?"

She barely nodded. "Killed at the Somme, poor fellow. He must have hated her to the end. In everything else he was large and splendid."

"And his name?"

Again Tabs was striving to remember where he had seen the unknown woman's face. He _had_ seen it--of that he was certain. He had the sense that the circumstances under which he had seen it had been tragic. If he could only make Maisie reveal the name, he might recall.

VII

"His name was Lord Dawn." Seeing the instant puckering of his brows, she asked quickly, "You knew him?"

"Knew him!" Tabs pondered the question. "I'm not sure. But Lady Dawn--I've heard a good deal about her. She had a nursing unit in France, didn't she? Of course she had; you and Terry were with her. It was in her hospital that Terry met Braithwaite. She passed me yesterday, driving with the Queen in the Park; not that I noticed her. It was Terry who did that." He came slowly over from the window to the fireplace and stood gazing level with the picture above the mantelpiece. He spoke wonderingly, "The most beautiful woman in England, they say! So this is Lady Dawn!"

When he had finished his inspection, his interest and absorption were so great that he did what he had vowed he would never do again--he sat down for a second time on the couch beside her.

"There's something wrong," he said quietly. "Either you're misinformed or I'm mistaken. Let's get things straight."

She made no attempt to conceal her amusement. She attributed his seriousness to sudden infatuation--an infatuation which made him seem ridiculously inconstant after his recent professions concerning Terry.

"Something wrong!" she echoed mockingly. "If you think that I've exaggerated anything that I've told you about----" She glanced up at the portrait. "I don't think I'm likely to be misinformed. After all, I'm her----"

"I didn't mean that," he interrupted impatiently. "I was referring to Lord Dawn. If he's the same man, I think both you and she have misjudged him."

Maisie laughed. "Lord Dawn was sufficiently definite. I'm not misjudging him. He left no room for misjudgment."

"But you said that he had died hating her."

"He did, as far as we know. He gave no sign to the contrary."

"But does she, Lady Dawn, think that?"

"Think that he hated her?"

"No, that he died hating her?"

Maisie picked up a cigarette from the table and looked to Tabs for a match. She was getting bored. "Why, certainly. One doesn't want to be cynical, but all the deaths on the casualty-lists weren't total losses. Some of them were releases. They weren't all--well, to put it mildly, occasions for wearing the deepest mourning. There were English wives to whom German shells were merciful--more merciful than English law. If they took lives, there were cases in which they restored freedom."

As Tabs struck a match and held it to her cigarette, his hand trembled. He had to steady his passion before he asked his question. "And you think that she, Lady Dawn, was one of these?"

Maisie blew out a lazy puff of smoke. "Everybody thinks so." Then she added pointedly, "Everybody who knows her and has a right to an opinion."

Tabs refused to be put off. There was a polite forbearance in his tone when he spoke. "The first thing to do is to make sure that my Dawn was the same as yours. Mine was known to us by no title; he was a Captain in the same battalion as myself. He was killed in front of Pozières.--Ah, I see by the way you start, that so was yours! But here's where the difference comes in; mine loved his wife, if she was his wife, more dearly than any man I have known. His devotion was the talk of the regiment."

She flipped the ash off her cigarette. "Then that puts him out of the running, doesn't it?"

It was the studied carelessness of her gesture that released the trigger of his indignation and made it leap out beyond control. There was in his mind the vision of those blood-baths of the Somme, where men had drowned in the putrescence and been flattened by shells like flies against a wall. They hadn't all been good before they had reached their ordeal. They had come, as most men come, from every kind of prison-house of lust and human error. But they'd been good when they had died. They'd been reborn into valor and tenderness. And now, to hear their imperfections discussed in this pleasant room, so entirely feminine, where everything was safe and warm! Their imperfections were so small as compared with their sacrifice. Modern-day Christs, that's what they were! Christs by the thousands, who had found no Josephs of Arimathea to hide their defilement in garden-sepulchres. There they lay at this moment in the wilderness of corruption where they had fallen, while living people between puffs of cigarettes, undertook to explain why they should not be regretted.

"Puts him out of the running! It doesn't."

He leapt to his feet and commenced to drag himself up and down the room, limping backwards and forwards, while she pressed lazily against the cushions at a loss to account for his excitement.

"It doesn't," he repeated, pausing opposite to her. "He's still in the running. The Dawn whom I knew was a very silent man. He was a man with a sorrow. It made him careless. He was in the war to die. We all knew it. The men adored him because of it. He was the finest officer in the finest of battalions."

He became aware that he was frightening her and sank his voice. The lowered tone only made what he said the more dreadfully impressive.

"There was something funny about him." He all but whispered it. "Something funny that we couldn't understand. We couldn't understand why he should want so much to die. The reason why we couldn't understand was a woman's photograph."

She looked up at him timidly. "Yes!"

"Wherever he went he carried it. When he went into an attack, he carried it next his heart. In billets he slept with it beneath his pillow. He pinned it against the walls of dug-outs. That was where I saw it. I remember now. It was smeared with the mud of a hundred trenches--Boche trenches as well as ours. It looked down on curious sights, did that woman's printed face in the photo." He laughed harshly. "Sights that those of us who were there will spend the rest of our lives in an effort to forget. And here you and I sit and talk---- Well, as I was saying, we couldn't fathom why he should be so keen on death when there was that woman in the world for whom he cared--for whom he cared right up to the last. It was at the Somme, in the attack on Pozières, that he went west. He was in command of a company that got cut off. When we found him, he had that bit of cardboard so tightly clasped that we couldn't take it from him."

He paused, suddenly exhausted. His indignation had burnt itself out. "I'm tired," he apologized. "I'm afraid I let myself get out of hand. I scared you for a moment. I'm sorry. Do you mind if I sit down?"

She pushed the table back to make it easier for him to take a place beside her. "It's all right," she consoled him. "I know that you're only just out of hospital. Terry told me. You're not really recovered yet. Besides, it was my fault; I spoke lightly. I wasn't thinking what I said. But I don't feel lightly about these things. I couldn't." Then she said something which struck him oddly. "You know my man's out there."

What did she mean by _her man_? If she had said _her men_, he could have comprehended. She had lost three husbands in the war. But why did she

## particularize and say, "My man"? It seemed cruel to the rest. And which

of the three was it that she regarded as so peculiarly hers.

He jerked his thoughts back. "There was something you told me about Lord Dawn; you said it explained him. How did it go? I think you said that he hated his wife as men hate God, because they love Him so much and yet He won't come down. Well, out there it wasn't like that. Dawn climbed up to her; yes, and perhaps beyond her. Out there he didn't need to pretend to hate her; he could afford to love her without loss of self-respect. I suppose he thought it was too late to tell her after all that had gone before."

"Either that," Maisie assented, "or else---- It would be like him. Or else because he was too much of a sportsman. As it was, if he were killed, she wouldn't need to be sorry. But if he wrote her that he loved her and had always loved her, and then got killed---- Don't you see, that's where her remorse would start?"

Tabs nodded. "And yet she was his last thought. She ought to know it. It's monstrous that she should go on believing----" He broke off. And then, "She must be told. It's merest justice--whatever it costs."

VIII

The light had been failing while they had talked. A tap fell on the door. Coming at that moment when their nerves were jangled, it sounded ominous. Their heads turned sharply. Maisie's voice was unsteady when she asked, "What is it? What do you want?"

"It's Porter, Madam. Dinner is served."

"Oh, come in, Porter. Have you laid a place for Lord Taborley?"

As the maid entered, Tabs rose. "I had no idea---- Why, I've been here for hours. I really must apologize, Mrs. Lockwood, and be going."

However much his reception had been prearranged, dinner had formed no part of the program. The slightly puzzled expression on Maisie's watch-dog's face betrayed that fact to him at a glance.

Maisie laid an arresting hand on his arm. To the maid she said cheerfully, "It's all right, Porter; Lord Taborley is staying."

As Porter was making her exit, he commenced again to protest. Maisie silenced his objections by leaning against him warningly. "You've talked of everything except me," she whispered; "it was about me you came to talk. You _must_ before we part."

Following her across the hall to the dining-room, he reflected on her ability for getting him into deeper and yet deeper water. He had the feeling that he was being led somewhere against his will--somewhere that might be for his good or for his harm, but which would inevitably cut him off from many of his old affections. He had the discomforting sense that he was doing something disloyal to Terry. Heaven knew what promises might not be exacted from him before the evening ended. When would it end? He would have to stay for at least an hour after coffee--that would bring him to nine o'clock. Sir Tobias Beddow would have been expecting him long before that to deliver his account of the result of his mission. Furthermore, Sir Tobias would be demanding an explanation as to how it was that, having asked for Terry's hand the night before, he was still unengaged to her. If he postponed the interview till to-morrow, it would create the appearance of lukewarmness. He couldn't very well excuse himself by saying that he'd spent the afternoon and evening with Maisie. And he couldn't get Maisie to let him off on the plea that Sir Tobias, her harshest critic, was waiting for him. Besides, he had accomplished nothing as yet; Adair Easterday had not been mentioned.

If ever he made good his escape, he prayed that he might never again encounter a woman possessed of charm. His paramount desire was to seize his hat and make a furtive exit. There was nothing to prevent him but the politeness due from a man to a woman--and she traded on it. As he passed into the dining-room he was secretly on his guard. "I wonder what she'll do next to inveigle me?" was his thought.

"It'll be only a little dinner," she explained as they seated themselves. "You weren't expected. But Porter always has something hidden away for an emergency. Don't you, Porter?"

He was getting accustomed to these asides addressed to Porter. He began to perceive that Porter had other uses besides gliding round the table in a cap and apron. She was a conversational stop-gap when situations grew awkward, as they frequently must between an ensnared bachelor and an unchaperoned widow.

And she was eligible; he had to own it as they sat down to their first meal together. Tea hadn't counted as a meal; you can serve tea to anybody. But dinner for two, in an oak-paneled room, when the spring dusk is falling is different. The table was lit by four naked candles. Looped back from the windows hung the marigold-tinted curtains, revealing in triangular patches the courtyard, with its mock village-green and its quaintly timbered houses. It looked very real in the half-light. An electric street-lamp stood out sharply against the fading sky, placid and contemplative as an unclouded moon. Several houses away a woman was singing. Sometimes her voice sank so that he lost the air; but once, when it rose, he caught the words, "Crushing out life, than waving me farewell." He knew what she was singing then and followed the air in his imagination. The atmosphere of the room was vibrant with romance; all that was lacking was his impulse to be romantic.

Maisie was chattering gayly and forestalling his wants. He reserved a small portion of his mind for her conversation--sufficient to enable him to reply "Yes" or "No" when the occasion seemed to demand it. It was clear to him that it made her happy to have a man so entirely at her mercy. She meant immensely well by him. Behind her mist of words she seemed to be saying, "Isn't it nice to be just we two together?"

But he was thinking of the other three soldiermen who had played the game of being "just we two together" before him. The singing voice, drifting through the courtyard, put into words the question of his thought, "Where are you now? Where are you now?" Yes, where were they?

He felt pity and distaste for Maisie in equal proportions. Those men had each in turn caressed her, dipped their hands in the largesse of her pale gold hair, seen their souls' reflection in the cornflower innocence of her eyes, drunk forgetfulness from the poppy-petals of her mouth and gone away to die, believing she was wholly theirs. How little of her was theirs now! She was almost virginal--as though she had never been touched by their passion. And yet there seemed to be one of them whose memory had outstayed the rest, for she had said, "You know, my man's out there." Was she merely a light, predatory woman or---- Or very loving and lonely?

She was speaking more seriously now. "We mustn't tell her. It's natural to be sorry for him now that he's dead." He picked up the thread and guessed that she was referring to Lord Dawn.

"We must tell her," he said.

"But we mustn't," she urged. "For years he tried to make her wretched. There were rumors of other women. She's found peace at last. It wouldn't help him to let her know that he had died loving her out there. He's beyond any help of ours. They all are." He surmised who the _they_ were: the three soldiermen who had sat there before him. In pleading for silence for others, she was pleading for silence for herself. Again she was defending herself against his thoughts. "All of the dead had their chance. Lord Dawn had; there were so many years in which he might have told her. To tell her now would be to rob----"

She broke off as the maid reëntered with the coffee. Her tone changed instantly to one of convention. "Not here, Porter. We'll have it in the drawing-room."

As he followed her out across the hall, he glanced at his watch. It was past eight o'clock. He could lose no more time. He must plunge boldly into the subject of his mission and bring his visit promptly to an end. He dreaded the temptation of that feminine room, with its coziness and security and quiet. It made him too much alone with her; she was not a woman that it was wise to be alone with too long.

The moment the maid had left them and the door had closed, he became confirmed in the sanity of this decision. Everything in the room appealed to him to procrastinate. The curtains before the French windows were closely drawn. The hearth had been swept in their absence; the fire glowed more companionably than ever. About the table, where the coffee waited, a solitary lamp shed a golden blur. It was heavily shaded with yellow silk, so that most of its light escaped their faces and fell downwards.

She had seated herself on the couch. When she had filled both cups, she glanced up at him smilingly, patting the vacant place beside her as a sign that he should occupy it. He was standing before the fire, looking immensely tall in the semi-darkness. He could see her plainly where she sat beneath the lamp; but of him she could see nothing but his outline, for his eyes were lost in shadow. When he seemed not to have noticed her sign, "Come," she said coaxingly. "You don't spare yourself at all. You make yourself tired by so much standing."

"Mrs. Lockwood----" She started as he called her that. Twice already she had been Maisie to him. "Mrs. Lockwood, as you reminded me before dinner, it was about you that I came here to talk. Let's get it over. I haven't any idea how far things have gone. I should like to believe that nine-tenths of what's said is nothing more than gossip. But why can't you let him alone? He may mean nothing or a tremendous lot to you--but why can't you?"

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE AIR OF CONQUEST

I

She sat very silently, the way he had seen men sit when they were wounded. She had been expecting the blow and trying to postpone it; now that it had fallen her only feeling was one of peace because the expecting was ended. Her face remained turned towards him, as it had been while he had been talking. As though a mask had dropped, the real, very tired, very young, very lonely Maisie watched him. The wistfulness of her beauty surprised and touched him. Several times her lips moved in an attempt to say something. Then, at last, "What right have you to ask?"

"I should like to claim the right of friendship."

"Of friendship!" She frowned slightly, peering from beneath the lamp in an effort to make out his features. Then her eyes cleared and she smiled. "If you don't mean it, please don't say it. You see, it would hurt afterwards. And--and I should like to have you for my friend."

[Illustration: "_Mrs. Lockwood, why can't you let Adair alone?_"]

He came over from the fireplace and seated himself beside her. "We've been almost enemies--just a little afraid of each other. Isn't that so? It's ever so much more comfortable now; we'll be able to talk more easily. Tell me honestly, what do you see in Adair?"

"See in him!"

She commenced sipping her coffee. She looked extraordinarily like Terry used to do years ago, when she was a little lass and had been naughty, and had come reluctantly to ask pardon. He thought that if he went on talking he might make it easier for her.

"You'll wonder why I, who never knew you until to-day, should have taken upon myself to broach this subject."

"I don't wonder," she headed him off. "I know. Terry's my friend. Her father was determined to send somebody, so she worked things in order that you might be sent. She thought that you would be the kindest person."

"She thought that!" Tabs was a little taken back by her assertion; it seemed to pledge him to kindness before he had learnt whether kindness was required or deserved. It made him in a sense her partisan, when he ought to have been impartial.

"I think I can be trusted to be kind," he said; "but you must remember that I've got to be kind all round. I must be kind to Adair's wife and to his children. If this goes much further it will spell tragedy for them."